The present invention relates to an information-provision control method adopted in an information reproduction system including at least one information-provision apparatus and a plurality of information reproduction apparatuses used for sequentially reproducing information provided by the information-provision apparatus, as well as relates to this information reproduction system, the information-provision apparatus, the information reproduction apparatus and an information-provision control program.
In recent years, with popularization of personal computers and the increasing number of applications of the Internet, by using a personal computer at a home or at a working place, a large number of accesses to a server connected to the Internet can be made to download a variety of content data and a large number of emails can be exchanged in a wide range of applications. In addition, the operations to download audio and video data from a server as content data by way of the Internet have been becoming regular day-to-day operations. For example, a technology has been proposed for an Internet-based chat system as a technology allowing audio data to be provided at the same time to a plurality of persons participating in a chat to be listened to by the participants in the same way as text data. For details of this technology, refer to Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-184292, which is referred to as patent reference 1.
In this way, through the so-called WAN (Wide Area Network), communication technologies have been dramatically making progress to provide the user with a convenient application environment as evidenced by, among others, the fact that necessary information can be acquired in a short period of time at places such as a home and a working place whereas information can be exchanged smoothly as advancements of efforts to share information.
Moreover, in addition to the WAN system, a LAN (Local Area Network) system can be constructed as a network connecting personal computers and peripheral apparatus to each other in a limited space such as a home or rooms inside a building. The LAN system is widely used as a system for allowing users to share resources such as files and a printer.
In the conventional LAN system employing UARTs (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transceivers), however, a sufficiently high communication speed cannot be assured, raising a problem that, for example, it takes too long time to exchange audio data that should be transmitted at a required communication speed of about 1.4 MBps (megabytes per second).
In addition, with recent introduction of a USB (Universal Serial Bus), a personal computer becomes capable of transmitting audio data by way of a USB terminal. Nevertheless, the maximum length of its cable is fixed at 5 m. Thus, for example, even a personal computer located in the same room is not capable of playing the role of an active speaker.
With progress made in recent years in Internet technologies, however, communication using a TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which has been becoming popular, not only allows audio data to be transferred in a sufficiently short period of time given its communication speed and communication reliability, but also allows the length of a cable used in a LAN system built at a place like a home to be extended to a maximum of 100 m. Thus, sounds of music can distributed to any locations in the facility. In addition, through a piece of equipment such as a Network HUB, the number of apparatus connectable to the network can be increased.
On the top of that, if only audio data is to be transferred through a given communication band, a plurality of pieces of audio data can be transmitted once simultaneously. Thus, by providing a server having a sufficient processing power, it is possible to prepare an environment in which clients installed in a plurality of rooms are capable of listening to desired audio data being distributed at the same time from the server.
Accordingly, a personal computer installed at a home and a variety of AV (Audio/Visual) apparatus provided in rooms of the home can be connected to each other through a LAN. With such a LAN, it is possible to build an environment in which contents stored in the personal computer can be enjoyed at a variety of places such as the living room, study room and bedroom of the home. Examples of the contents are audio data, video data and AV data, which includes audio and video data collected synchronously.
Much like a WAN system, a LAN system also adopts a general method of utilization by which any client desiring information outputs a request for the information to a server used as an information provider and the server transmits the desired information to the server in response to the request. If the LAN system adopting such a method includes a plurality of clients, the clients are allowed to make accesses to the server simultaneously to receive a desired content at the same time.
By the way, the so-called home network system, which is a LAN system constructed at a home, is built in a house. Given such a home network system, the user raises a demand for a capability of enjoying a desired content in a room in which the user desires to enjoy the content. In this case, the user issues a request to typically a personal computer functioning as a server through an AV apparatus located in the room.
In addition, the user also raises a demand for a capability of allowing the user not to only listen to a desired audio content in a specific room through a particular AV apparatus, but also to continuously listen to the same audio content in another room through another AV apparatus located at the other room following a movement of the user from the specific room to the other room. On the top of that, in this case, it is desirable to merely require the user to operate only once either the particular AV apparatus in the specific room immediately before the movement or the other AV apparatus in the other room after the movement.
In the conventional home network system, however, as general operations to be carried out by the user on a particular AV apparatus in a specific room to make an access to the server to search the server for a desired content and control an operation to reproduce the content, normally, the user is capable of operating the particular AV apparatus presumably only for the purpose of reproducing the desired content in this AV apparatus. Thus, when the user moves from the specific room to another room after operating the particular AV apparatus, the user must stop the operation carried out by the particular AV apparatus to reproduce the content before the user moves from the specific room to the other room and then operate another AV apparatus installed in the other room in order to restart the operation to reproduce the desired content. Thus, from the user point of view, the operatability of the conventional home network system is poor and the operation to reproduce a content is interrupted every time the user moves from one room to another. That is to say, it is difficult to reproduce a content continuously.